This article has been written by Jan Zanetis, Education Advocate for Cisco in Australia. The original article was published in the December/January edition of Educational Leadership (EL). Visit EL to read the full version.

The Virtues of Video

Video-on-demand tutorials. International student collaborations. Virtual field trips to Australia. Schools can use interactive video to enrich students’ learning.

What if your struggling students could view demonstrations of difficult math concepts as often as necessary? Picture your students asking questions of an expert diver as she explores Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Or imagine a motivated student in a remote location attending an advanced placement physics class without leaving home.

Providing such enriching learning activities, even with limited funds, is no fantasy; it’s possible through live, interactive video.

At a conference on developing sustainable, connected and scalable cities, Cisco hosted an international roundtable using Cisco TelePresence, a high definition, life-sized video meeting solution, with education thought leaders from Amsterdam, Brisbane, Hong Kong, London and Lisbon.

Some participants joined via a Dialogue Cafe. Under the auspices of the United Nations, the Dialogue Cafe Association is building a network of publically available, video-enabled spaces that make it easier for innovators, students, public leaders and businesses to connect and collaborate across geographical, cultural and sometimes political divides.

Back in April this year I wrote a blog about a programme we drove in Europe last fiscal year called Reverse Mentoring, where a senior employee is also mentored by the junior employee. All of our 31 mentors and 31 mentees have now reached the end of the programme and I’d like to share with you their feedback – what they enjoyed, what worked well and what we can improve upon in the future. Read More »

Welcome to the first in a series of postings from the Cisco ANZ education team on what’s happening Down Under.

We’ll be providing updates on news, research and commentary across the higher education, K-12 as well as vocational education and training sectors.

Our first blog post focuses on Pymble Ladies College (PLC), an independent school in Sydney, Australia for girls from Kindergarten to year 12. It has recently partnered with Cisco to implement a range of video technologies for teachers and students to learn, collaborate and interact with experts in particular fields, anywhere in Australia or across the world.

There are a few of us at Cisco that write here regularly. We care about what is going on in Manufacturing in general, but more specifically, in terms of integrating the manufacturing networks into the Enterprise and speeding adoption of open standards to enable more efficient production.

I will later this month be launching a series on how Machine Builders can more readily enable productivity by integrating more closely with their end users (call that “convergence”) or by helping their end users be more productive by enabling secure remote access. But that is later this month.

Today I want to talk about how we all communicate. It isn’t just by wires. It isn’t just by mouth. We have a plethora of communication means available to us. I’m talking about us people to other people in the industry. It is by building contacts with people in industry and spreading the word. That is what we at Cisco are doing.

We don’t have every answer. We think we’ve got a number of good ones. We’re enhancing some of the areas. But this is not a commercial for Cisco. This is a commercial for open dialogue between those that care about Manufacturing.

There are a few good spokespeople for this effort, and I want to call them out. And I admit right upfront this is not a complete list. But please bear with me. Read More »

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